The NMDAR is the most investigated receptor in neuroscience because it is essential to synaptic plasticity, which is instrumental in establishing and remodeling brain circuitry and is thought to be the cellular foundation of learning and memory," said Thomas Papouin, Ph.D., research assistant professor at Tufts School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "The NMDAR is known to be activated by two chemicals: glutamate, which is supplied by neurons, and D-serine, which is supplied by astrocytes. While most research is focused on the role that neurons play in activating the NMDAR via glutamate, we focused on the role played by astrocytes through the release of D-serine.
“This is an exciting finding with direct relevance to development of new treatments for schizophrenia, which is characterized by low levels of D-serine and diminished NMDAR as well as a major loss of cholinergic function. Efforts to develop pharmaceuticals to address these deficits have so far been unsuccessful, but in our study we were able to enhance NMDAR function via D-serine by stimulating a7nAChRs with a drug that has been part of recent stage 3 clinical trials for schizophrenia,” said Philip G. Haydon, Ph.D., corresponding author on the paper, the Annetta and Gustav Grisard professor and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Tufts School of Medicine, and a member of the neuroscience program faculty at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts. “This suggests that cholinergic drugs now under development for schizophrenia work through this newly discovered astrocytic pathway.”
Read more at: Discovery of new pathway in brain has implications for schizophrenia treatment